I've spoken to them before about this... they said I needed to use a skip-hire or a private waste-pickup company, then in the same breath threatened me with prosecution if I picked one which wasn't licensed.

They do one collection per year, maximum of five "items" per collection. Everything has to be broken down. I wanted to get rid of two broken bedside tables, and they told me it'd count as at least nine items each! (edit: top, bottom, three sides, and four drawers)

I checked mine a little while back to find out if they had facilities for accepting expired photo chemistry. "Leave in chemical cupboard" it said, so off I went.

Chap comes over as I'm looking for said cupboard, asks if he can help. "Oh, just throw them in general waste" he says. "... are you sure? They're pretty toxic and not supposed to reach waterways." So he checks with his boss, who says:

"I told 'im to drink them, might make his hair grow back! Nah, general waste mate."

@twll This does seem to be a common problem. Five years ago, I walked an old radiator down to out tip, it's only a few hundred metres away on foot. Now, no pedestrians, pre-register all vehicles, book timeslots and get turned away if you miss them, and I've just found they're planning on closing it entirely (presumably as fewer people are coming now, I wonder why). Meanwhile, local fly-tipping has increased.

At least we do have WEEE curbside collections in a limited fashion, but this really does feel like the wrong way to going with the recycling centres.

I'm at a conference on the mathematics of planet Earth, and just saw a talk on ML for climate science. It was basically a 45 minute long plea to stop lobbing "general-purpose" tools developed on internet-scraped data at every problem, and instead include specific domain knowledge and expertise.

One thing they brought up was they had a bunch of wildlife experts look at classifications of wild animals in the ImageNet-1K data set (I think it was that one at least). Something like 10-15% of the labels were wrong, and another 11% were ambiguous in some way. The point being that people spend immense amounts of time trying to get better "accuracy" results on this data set with image recognition systems, but the data is too inaccurate for most scientific purposes because it's mostly crowdsourced, with no mechanism for incorporating necessary expert knowledge.

@wuweiwolf One of the biggest failings of "AI" implementation is the failure to communicate to users things like confidence intervals or alternative results and how far away they are from what was presented as The Answer.

Merlin would be a LOT more informative for teaching bird ID if it provided more details on how it got to particular matches, especially with song ID.

What Merlin has going for it appears to be strong validation of the source data, and eBird in general has a LOT of volunteer data validators. But now eBird is straining from a lot more bad submissions from users who are submitting IDs from Merlin only, without confirming the species themselves.

eBird has always been great at accumulating large amounts of data, but bad at managing the human component of the process.

This is close to my heart on two points:

1) The NHS being forced to outsource is creating supply chain risks that are costing lives.

2) In January, I needed an emergency transfusion of 4 Litres of fluids and blood products to keep me alive during surgery.

Something that you may not be aware of is that people who have received a transfusion in the UK after 1980 are not permitted to give blood, due to the infected blood scandal. The availability of blood for transfusion is an issue that may not affect you now, but once it has (i.e. because you have had a transfusion), you won't be permitted to give blood.

i'm o+ and i was in the uk 2 weeks ago 😑, but good reminder i should give here, it's been too long i didn't.

i hope people hear the call though.
@VulpineAmethyst

$ mkdir -p alpha/../beta/../alpha/beta/../alpha/beta/

$ find *
alpha
alpha/alpha
alpha/alpha/beta
alpha/beta
beta

I'm sure there is some sort of hidden art in this.

on most shells

mkdir -p ./{alpha,beta,gamma}

will lead to the same result as your last example

Or just pass 3 arguments …

mkdir -p {alpha,beta,gamma}

The -p isn't even strictly necessary in this case.

@neingeist you mean like this gem that can be used as a workaround if your sed doesn't have `-i`?

{ rm file.txt; sed '…' > file.txt ; } < file.txt

@scy @neingeist for that I use a tiny utility I wrote called 'reservoir', which reads and buffers input until EOF, then writes it all out again. With the -o option, you can tell it a file to overwrite. So you can do this kind of thing, without depending on your filter tool having an option that works like sed -i:

$arbitrary_filtering_command < filename | reservoir -o filename

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/utils/
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/utils/reservoir.html

@neingeist Isn't that basically sponge(1)?

https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

@scy @neingeist looks very similar, yes! This is definitely in the class of programs so simple that it's quicker to write it when you need it than look around for someone who's already written one.

Comparing the two: reservoir has the safety-catch of (by default) not overwriting the file with one of length 0, so that if the filtering process fails to start at all, you haven't blown away your input. On the other hand, sponge has an append mode, and also attempts atomic file replacement.

NORMAL PEOPLE: $ mkdir alpha beta gamma

YOU: $ mkdir -p alpha/../beta/../gamma

ME: $ for d in alpha beta gamma; do mkdir $d; done

So what you're saying is in theory I could do something like

mkdir -p root/zero/one/two/../../one_a/../one_b/../one_c/two_a/three/../three_a/../../../../zero_a/one_c/two_b

It's really cursed

$ mkdir -p a/b/{../{.,..},.}/c
$ tree
.
├── a
│ ├── b
│ │ └── c
│ └── c
└── c

Now, I'm thinking if there's an elegant way to make it draw a Pascal triangle 🤔

@joeyh @hattom I think the "why don't you just use bash brace expansion" brigade in this thread will still say you should have done this instead:

mkdir -p a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/{x,y,z}

but perhaps a counterargument is that a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/x/../y/../z will only follow the long common initial path once, meaning better performance and fewer race conditions